sBooks: Reinventing the Software of the BookMay 7, 2009

Just on the heels of Amazon's announcement of the Kindle DX, beingmeta, an MIT spin-off based
in Boston, has announced the initial public beta of sBooks, a software platform which
"reinvents the software of the book" and provides reading experiences
which improve on interaction with physical books. The sBooks platform
is the software analogue to hardware devices like Amazon's Kindle or
Sony's e-Reader, enriching the reading experience with unique
navigation, search, and social features. And unlike the $490 hardware
of the Kindle DX, beingmeta's innovative software platform is
available for free under an open source license.

Dr. Kenneth Haase, chief architect of sBooks and a founder of
beingmeta, explains "sBooks are social, semantic, and structured. We
are using the possibilities of technology to gently add context and
background to the reading experience." For example, readers of
sBooks can see and share selected comments with their friends and
colleagues through existing social networks like Facebook. beingmeta
hopes that the opportunity for social interaction around texts will
draw readers to gather around the books they love and may even
encourage some readers to take on texts which they wouldn't normally
consider reading alone. "There are so many important ideas and
conversations which don't fit into the blogbite or the video clip. A
technology like sBooks supports the exposure and exploration of these
ideas by providing context, framing, and --- most importantly ---
community."

Readers of sBooks will also be able to take advantage of a special
kind of knowledge embedded in the book itself. Instead of a
traditional book's hierarchical index, an sBook contains a
knowlet (a small knowledge base) which
describes aspects of the real or imagined world that the book is
about. This knowledge base is used to describe the content of the
book and makes it easier to search, browse, or review. A book's
knowlet also captures connections and variations among words and
meanings, making search with a knowlet more natural and accurate than
full text searches across the book's content.

"Most e-books try to be 'just as good' as a physical volume, but
they should really be able to be BETTER," says Haase. This isn't
neccessarily easy. "The physical form of the book tells readers how
long it is, the progress they've made, and the places they and their
co-readers have frequented. Thumbing the pages gives a sense of the
scale and location of sections and chapters while notes in the margin
can offer history or insights like echoes of past readers." The
just-released web version of sBooks uses a light overlay on the book
content to convey this kind of information as the reader advances
through the book. It stays out of the way until the reader needs to
draw on the context, background, or connections. beingmeta is looking
at similarly unobtrusive approaches to deal with the relatively small
screens of cell phones or the peculiar dynamics of the e-Ink displays
on the new generation of readers like Amazon's Kindle.

sBooks take special advantage of the network connectivity provided by
cell phones or Amazon's reader. By connecting to external resources
and networks, reading and understanding can be amplified by a larger
community. "The real opportunity is not bringing books off-paper but
bringing them on-network." Haase thinks sBooks can provide a
lifeline for the publishing industry. "For centuries, publishers have
made money by adding value to the works of authors through editing,
formatting, and distribution. As technology has driven down the
margins on both production and distribution, consumers see less added
value worth paying for. But sBooks provide new ways to add value ---
social connections and rich networked metadata --- that are both more
sustainable and harder to pirate."

beingmeta looks forward to helping traditional and non-traditional
publishers add value to their content in new ways based on the
possibilities of the sBooks platform. And as a company dedicated to
both doing good and doing well, beingmeta sees its technology as a way
of bridging physical, economic, and social boundaries around the
shared experiences of learning and enjoyment engendered by books.

You can learn more about the sBooks platform (and how to use it with
your content) at www.sbooks.net.

About beingmeta beingmeta is a Boston-based
company founded in 2001 as a spin-off of the MIT Media Laboratory.
The company's mission is to use technology to help people and
communities be both smarter and wiser through social and semantic
services and applications.
Contact: Kenneth Haase, beingmeta, inc, +1(617) 297-2536http://www.beingmeta.com/.